Posted 2009-10-22 21:38:09 UTC by Byron

It’s great to be a part of Heroku and to get the welcome from James and team as well as from the various customers, partners, and developers I’ve spoken with over the past few weeks. Heroku, the Ruby community at large, and the “cloud” market in general are growing and evolving quickly. As you can tell, we have a lot of exciting applications being deployed on our platform and are constantly working to improve and expand our offerings. I wanted to use my first blog post with the company to talk specifically about areas where we are going to be super focused over the coming months:

1) Making Heroku’s growing ecosystem work for you.

We’ve seen great traction with partners (formal and informal) who’ve built various extensions or additions to our platform, and we’ve also seen a surprising amount of our business come from consultancies who are doing application development for their customers and are recommending Heroku as the deployment platform as choice. We’re going to make it easier for our customers, prospects, and users to take advantage of our partner’s offerings, and to enable our partners to more easily grow their own businesses by working with Heroku. We’ll have some announcements on this front coming over the next weeks and months.

2) Continue strengthening Heroku’s position as both the most productive platform to run your Ruby applications and the most trusted, reliable, and operationally transparent service.

Some of the world’s largest companies trust us with their applications, and some of the most exciting and fastest growing sites do so as well – we have numerous customer applications serving hundreds of millions of pages a month on Heroku. We are continuing to invest substantially in our own operational infrastructure as well as our support processes, tools, and services that we provide to customers. As our platform continues its tremendous growth we will continue to deliver and improve upon (there’s always room for improvement) our stability and reliability.

Transparency is one area that we’ve specifically looked to make improvements, and I’m happy to say that we recently launched status.heroku.com to make it easy and simple for you to check on the status of our service, and to see in the cases where there was an issue how we deal with it and what the impact is. I’m also very gratified that we have a very robust beta process thanks to an energetic group of customers investing their time and energy using beta features and giving us great, concrete feedback.

3) Expanding the number of applications and scenarios where you can see real business value in building and running your application on Heroku.

We see customers using us not just for easy and rapid deployment, but more importantly for the efficiency and smoothness of ongoing operation of their applications. We hear more and more that customers are saving not just time, but real, hard dollars due to the automation and efficiencies in our platform. There is a lot more we can do here, and some of them are super secret, while still more are just gleams in Adam, Orion, and James’s eyes right now (you can only imagine…).

A couple of important platform features that you’ll be seeing shortly are fully production-ready and cloud-aware application monitoring and memcached services. These have both been used extensively through our beta process. We can’t wait to get them out to you, and to continue regularly adding to the portfolio of services you have to choose from as you deploy on Heroku.

Finally, as this is my first post at Heroku, I want to thank our customers, users, and evangelists for your enthusiasm, your feedback, and your business; I hope you won’t hesitate to contact me or us when you have questions, feedback, or yes, even gripes. My email is byron at heroku dot com, and our contact page gives you easy places to get in touch.